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And to Think I Saw It @ MoMA!

Artificial Biological Clock by Revital Cohen (2008). The object collates a variety of data to determine a woman’s optimal time to bear a child.

Posted above the doorway of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is a question raised in 1911 by the painter Wassily Kandinsky: “Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?”

The quote introduces “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925,” about the birth of nonrepresentational art. But it could easily migrate downstairs three floors to “Applied Design,” a show of works from MoMA’s design collection that opened on Saturday and will be on view through January 2014.

Organized by Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the museum, with Kate Carmody, a curatorial assistant, and Paul Galloway, supervisor of the museum’s Study Center, “Applied Design” is a bold bracketing of furnishings, tools, graphics and games that challenge what we imagine design to be. Unlike the streamlined chairs, automobiles and utensils that are staples of MoMA’s collection, most of the roughly 100 items displayed here will never be found on eBay. But you can see them in video arcades and biotechnology labs and even on the keypads of communications devices.

Ms. Antonelli has roamed this unconventional turf in previous MoMA shows. “Design and the Elastic Mind” (2008), for instance, explored the productive partnership between design and science in works like BioWall, a lacy fiberglass partition by the London design studio Loop.pH, which was formed from mathematically derived shapes and woven with living plants. “Talk to Me” (2011) opened a window onto the increasingly complicated relationship between people and machines; its many engrossing examples included the Artificial Biological Clock designed by Revital Cohen, a prototype for a device that collates online data from a woman’s doctor, therapist and bank manager to determine the right time for her to have a child.

Both of these works can be found in “Applied Design,” where they are cleanly displayed and easier to study than in the rich thickets of their prior installations. They are joined not just by companions from those earlier shows but also by other recent additions to the permanent collection.

In an audacious stroke, Ms. Antonelli acquired 14 video games for the museum last fall, including Pac-Man, Tetris, Myst and Canabalt. They’re installed in housings of utter sobriety along three walls of this exhibition. Visitors are invited to play several of the games and watch samples of the elaborate digital worlds constructed over time in others.

And posted at the rear of the gallery is the “@” symbol, which Ms. Antonelli brought to MoMA with much fanfare two years ago. The mark dates at least from the Middle Ages and was long used by merchants notating orders of commercial goods sold at a particular price. What MoMA “owns” is a typographical version of the symbol adopted by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 while he was designing the first e-mail system developed by the United States government.

Ms. Antonelli is less interested in the form of the mark than its role in creating global networks. Like video games, the @ symbol is our passport to enter the digital realm, at the border between flesh and technology. Ms. Antonelli sees design potential in “the space between human and digital,” she noted last week. This is the frontier of science fiction where bodies are augmented by empowering prosthetics — the scenarios of “The Six Million Dollar Man” and the 1999 David Cronenberg film “eXistenZ.” Except Ms. Antonelli believes that such clumsy enhancements will ultimately evolve into a seamless interface between human and digital, with the mind as controller.

If only the label “Applied Design” communicated the excitement of that vision. Usually, Ms. Antonelli dreams up inspired titles for her shows, but the name “Applied Design” is mysteriously drab and even redundant: design by almost any definition serves some practical end. What does “applied” mean for work that was always presumably intended for use?

Ms. Antonelli said she was thinking about a future when the design field will be subdivided, like physics, into theoretical and applied branches. (That future is within sight, one should add; even now, designers once known for creating cold, hard objects are rebranding themselves as “innovation strategists” who produce ideas rather than things.) At the same time, she said, she was riffing on an old term for design: “applied art.”

Fundamentally, however, the title refers to the many arenas in which designers are active. Ms. Antonelli hasn’t abandoned the object, but she is keen to show it as an outgrowth of open-ended technologies like 3-D printing and conceptual models like biomimicry, where design is patterned on nature.

On view, for example, is the Lily Impeller, a flowing hunk of stainless steel that Jayden D. Harman, an inventor and entrepreneur, modeled on the Fibonacci spiral. The shape, which curls like a nautilus shell, allows the device to circulate millions of gallons of water efficiently in municipal water systems.

It’s a gorgeous object. “I want to remind people of the importance of elegance: the fact that beauty should not be costlier or harder to find than nonbeauty,” Ms. Antonelli said of the many visually compelling displays in the show, including lacy textiles from the Dutch studio Freedom of Creation made by rapid-prototyping technology and a floor lamp by the British designer Paul Cocksedge that is effectively a big fiber-optic strand. People who stop to admire such objects will be poised to think about “a world of very serious manufacturing and materials considerations,” she said. “They seduce you with their form, then transport you into the future of design.”

And what if those seductions lead not to the future but to a dead end of artistic self-indulgence? The kind of object that looks better on paper (or in a museum setting) than in practice?

That’s the charge against one of the star exhibits, Mine Kafon, an instrument designed to float across fields and detonate buried land mines. Created by Massoud Hassani, an Afghan, as a student project at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Mine Kafon would seem above reproach: it’s made inexpensively of recycled materials; it’s powered by a renewable energy source, the wind; it promises to save lives; it can be easily repaired when damaged; and with its resemblance to a fluffy dandelion, it’s a visual poem. Sitting in the corner of an exhibition space, it commands serious attention, even without the accompanying video that shows it in action.

But Marc Vlemmings, a journalist in the Netherlands, is a critic of the invention. Debating its merits in the Dutch design magazine Items, he argued that Mine Kafon is a prototype that hasn’t been tested and refined sufficiently to earn its plaudits (not least of which is a place in MoMA’s permanent collection). He was rankled by the premise of a minesweeper following an erratic, wind-driven path rather than a systematic program for clearing the weapons. “The Mine Kafon provides inhabitants of a mine-infested area with a false sense of security,” he said.

When told of the objection, Ms. Antonelli countered: “Sometimes there are hero objects that sensitize the world. I never thought that it was tested and ready to be deployed, but I thought that the concept was so strong, so convincing and so powerful, even because of the connection to the designer’s personal history, that it was enough for us.”

Still, the idea of heroic yet possibly ineffective design would have disturbed some of Ms. Antonelli’s predecessors at MoMA. Much modern design is based on the principle that objects that perform wonderfully (whether paper clips or BMWs) can’t help looking wonderful, whereas objects that fail to work bear the aesthetic mark of their ineptitude.

History has proved this maxim wrong many times, but never so persuasively as in the age of the computer chip, when the relationship between appearance and performance has become increasingly irrelevant. Now, tiny microprocessors govern the effectiveness of many designs. Form and function have undergone a rancorous divorce and frequently occupy separate quarters of the same objects.

But no matter what activity churns in the silicon brain of a design, a museum exhibition is still compelled to make it appealing. If there are heroics in this show, they lie in Ms. Antonelli’s willingness to pursue design down slippery corridors into challenging places like molecular biology and five-dimensional space. Her interest in design as a response to new technologies and social conditions — a promoter of experience rather than an object to be passively considered, even in the formal precincts of a museum — is in step with the way design is being executed in the world.

Ultimately, she may expand the definition of design so far that it explodes, but will that matter? She’s calling a messy, restless, enthralling discipline exactly as she sees it. Maybe it’s time to think of another name for design — or several.

A version of this article appears in print on March 7, 2013, on Page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: And to Think I Saw It @ MoMA!. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe